6:45pm: The Thirteenth Child flap
My comments, in random order, subject to update....
This book is a fantasy. I wonder if its denouncers have read Wrede's ENCHANTED FOREST series. They might complain that dragons are not real, that the social order of castles and princesses and heroes is not supported by actual history....
Thirteenth Child is not serious 'alternate history' either.
This is not a book like Walton's FARTHING, whose basc effect is a dark mirroring of our world, 1 for 1. CHILD is a different world to be read as standing alone, without needing to mirror anything.
Stereotypes. Firefly/Serenity used plot and character stereotypes. It wasn't realistic either: a space ship with skillets dangling on the kitchen wall? It was ABOUT stereotypes. So is CHILD, to some extent (as was ENCHANTED FOREST).
Walton described CHILD (qfm -- I'm quoting from memory) as LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE with mammoths and magic. Elsewhere Walton described her own TOOTH AND CLAW as (qfm) FRAMLEY PARSONAGE with dragons. Maybe they would fault that for unrealism too.
Thirteenth Child is fiction, fantasy fiction, in a fantasy world.
Here is what's posted at Patricia's website:
"Eff Rothmer is the twin sister of a seventh son
of a seventh son, growing up on the edge of
the "safe" settled area of the U.S. in the
1850s (though history has not gone quite the
way it did in our world-the Civil War, for
instance, happened in 1832, and Lewis and
Clark never came back...)
This is the first book of a fantasy trilogy about
settling the West in a world where magic
works and the New World was not settled until
modern magic (of Columbus' day) made it
possible to fend off the dangerous wildlife
(which includes both imaginary beasts like
steam dragons and spectral bears, and real-life
post-ice-age creatures like wooly mammoths)."
Wrede said of the world of THIRTEENTH CHILD:
"The prehistoric people who, in our world, emigrated across the land bridge and through the Arctic Circle didn’t even try to get past the ice dragons; their descendants are all still back on the eastern Pacific rim, and the history of Asia is far less recognizable than that of the Mediterranian area. Unfortunately, my narrator is not particularly interested in global history or politics, so most of that is only present in the text by implication."
(One detractor said that in that case Wrede should have set the book in Asia and made it about the Asians instead!)
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